With City Council expected to bless the 2012 bond program on Thursday  the next step towards the public vote in May  city staff continue to plan the downtown projects benefiting from the program. Perhaps the most complicated of these items has to do with the expansion of the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center.

In order to create space for an expansion that would increase the convention center’s exhibit space by 100,000 square feet, Market Street would have to be realigned. (See map above.) Essentially, the street would continue east to I-37, where traffic would still be able to enter the highway.

What the map does not show are plans to connect Market Street with Commerce to help with the circulation to and from the east side.

“This one-way cup-let of Market and Commerce functions well,” said Mike Frisbie, director of the city’s Capital Improvements Management Services department. “You see a lot of big city downtowns that have that kind of a set up. And bringing them back together would be nice to really provide that connectivity now to the east side.”

These plans were first introduced to City Council just before the holidays. The plans also call for the former SAWS headquarters on Market Street to be demolished; the city acquired the building in 2004.

Currently, there is a request for qualifications out for the design work, which is being funded by savings in the downtown infrastructure portion of the 2007 bond program.

Funding the actual construction would come from the 2012 bond program  $40 million in earmarked for downtown streets.

If voters approve the bond program in May, and Market Street is eventually realigned, then construction on the convention center expansion would begin.

“We’re building about 100,000 square feet of exhibit space,” said Mike Sawaya, the city’s director of Convention Sports and Entertainment Facilities.

The expansion would increase the center’s exhibit space from 426,000 square feet in the current footprint to 528,000 square feet. San Antonio would still rank below the giants in the U.S. convention industry Chicago, Orlando and Las Vegas  but, Sawaya said, “the key for us is to build the best facility.”

“This is sized perfectly for what it takes up in hotel space available downtown,” Sawaya said.

Two preliminary studies have already been completed. The city hopes to hire a firm to actually design the project by the end of 2012.

Envisioned in the expansion would be more flexible exhibit space, as well as the latest in technological amenities.

Once the expansion is complete, the next step would be the demolition of the portions of the convention center that were built prior to 1999  or, essentially, the western half.

The project is expected to cost at least $250 million, all paid for by hotel occupancy tax money, Sawaya said.

As it has been reported previous, clearing the original convention center structure, on the corner of Market and Commerce streets, would better connect the busiest areas of downtown with HemisFair Park, which is slated to receive its own cut  $30 million  from the 2012 bond for its redevelopment.

Sawaya said, the plan is to break ground on the convention center expansion at the end of 2013.

In other convention center news. . . facade work on the convention center’s northwestern and western faces is scheduled to be complete in two weeks. The $1.2 million project calls for the removal of the porte-cochère, at the same time better defining the convention center’s entrance. But why put money into a portion of the convention center which will eventually be demolished?

“You can’t stop impacting the building,” Sawaya said of the project that was started in 2006. “You just carry it through.”